David Makinson

David Clement Makinson (born 27 August 1941) is an Australian logician living in France.

Career Makinson began his studies at the University of Sydney in 1958 and completed them at Oxford University in 1965, with a D.Phil on modal logic under Michael Dummett. He worked in the American University of Beirut (1965-1982), UNESCO (1980-2001), King’s College London (2002-2006), the London School of Economics (LSE) (2006-2019), and currently holds a position of Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Queensland.

Contributions David Makinson works across a number of areas of logic, including modal logic, deontic logic, belief revision, uncertain reasoning, relevance-sensitive logic and, more recently, topics in the history of logic. Among his contributions: in 1965, as a graduate student, he identified the preface paradox and adapted the method of maximal consistent sets for proving completeness results in modal logic; in 1969 he discovered the first simple and natural propositional logic lacking the finite model property; in the 1980s, with Carlos Alchourrón and Peter Gärdenfors, he created the AGM account of belief change; in the early 2000s, with Leon van der Torre, he created input/output logic; in 2017 he adapted the method of truth-trees to relevance-sensitive logic.